Here's Why A Former PayPal Exec Absolutely Hates Meetings

Meetings can be extremely boring (this is not David
Sacks).Flick/Dell
Inc

In the early days of PayPal, David Sacks managed over 700 employees as the
company's COO.

According to an interesting Quora post, Sacks hated
meetings while he was leading PayPal. Former senior executive
Keith Rabois wrote that Sacks was skeptical of any meeting that
included more than three or four people. He would randomly pop in
on meetings, and immediately shut them down if he decided that
they seemed inefficient. PayPal's annual review forms in 2002
even rated employees on whether they avoided "imposing on
others' time, e.g. scheduling unnecessary meetings."

Why did Sacks despite meetings? Luckily, he explains his
reasoning in yet another Quora thread.

Email culture is vastly superior to meeting culture, Sacks
believes, because people can make progress on dozens of issues
simultaneously by email in the time it would take simply to
organize their schedules for a single meeting. The quality of
decisions made from emails are also better because there's no
arbitrary "end time" — people can respond when they're ready,
while pulling in additional people and information if needed.

He writes that large meetings also hint at underlying
organizational problems. By popping in on meetings occasionally,
he got a better understanding of how the company was organized,
and what its weaknesses might be. "If a dozen people from
product, marketing, sales, etc., are meeting to hash out
international issues on a frequent basis, perhaps it's time to
create an international team dedicated to solving these
problems," Sacks writes. "I got a feel for refinements that we
should make to the org chart, such as adding new teams to cover
unmet needs or re-defining roles to avoid overlaps in job
responsibilities."